


I'd Be Fired If That Were My Job

by frausorge



Series: Bad Weather Friend [1]
Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-15
Updated: 2008-01-15
Packaged: 2017-10-05 17:00:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/43968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frausorge/pseuds/frausorge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Good morning," Patrick said cautiously. "Who am I talking to?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'd Be Fired If That Were My Job

**Author's Note:**

> Many heartfelt thanks to wearemany and uhmidont for beta and moral support. Title from They Might Be Giants. Inspired by this interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5a9cjkh9DU

Patrick woke up to knees clamped around his waist, Jack Skellington in the corner of his vision, liner-smudged eyes staring down at him, and a voice chanting "morning, morning, wake up, genius, it's morning."

"Good morning," Patrick said cautiously. "Who am I talking to?"

All he got by way of reply was a deep laugh and the thrust of hips against his stomach. Patrick closed his eyes again and took as deep a breath as he could under the circumstances. "Hi, Jason," he said.  
   


When Patrick first joined the band, he thought Pete was kind of forgetful, or maybe getting fucked up on something despite his claims of edge. "You were _right there_," Patrick found himself saying, more than once. "Don't you remember?" Pete would stare back for a moment and then shake his head slightly and turn away. But Pete was charming and moody and brilliant and inconsistent in general, and Patrick never bothered to follow up with more than a heavy roll of his eyes.

Then Patrick saw Pete on his knees sucking Seth's cock, only two days after his impassioned speech to the band about how being straight didn't exempt him from fighting the homophobia in the hardcore scene. Patrick closed the van door loudly, and for a little while after that he thought Pete was just a liar.

Pete came to find him a day or so later, while Patrick was doing laundry in some girl's parents' basement where Andy had gotten them a night. "Patrick," Pete said, "I need – I need to talk to you."

Patrick poured detergent into the washer and closed the lid. "So talk," he said.

"Patrick," Pete said.

Patrick gave in and turned to look at him.

"You're mad," Pete began. "You've been mad since you saw Seth in the van. Am I right?"

Patrick lifted his hand and turned it, temporizing. "It's not the van, Pete. I mean, sure, it'd be nice if you could do that shit somewhere where we don't all have to sleep later, but -"

"Yeah, no," Pete said. "Forget the van. But you're pissed at me."

"Well, yeah," Patrick said. "Or –" Pete's eyes were dark and serious, for once, and Patrick frowned, trying to think clearly. "Or, disappointed, or confused, I guess. I just don't get it, Pete. I mean, you made this big fucking deal about it, and – why'd you make up that whole spiel about the scene? Why couldn't you just tell us you're gay? Or bi, or, I mean, whatever. You know none of us is going to care, if you just tell us."

"Listen," Pete said. He pressed his lips together and braced his hands on the top of the dryer behind him. "Listen to me. Patrick."

Patrick lifted his eyebrows. "I'm listening."

"I'm not gay," Pete said.

And then he said – his voice said – _a_ voice, a little more throaty maybe, a little more husky, or was that Patrick's imagination? - someone said: "I am."  
   


Joe always knew when it was Pete with them and when it was Jason. Patrick tried to ask how he knew, but Joe only shrugged and said, "I just do." Andy admitted privately to Patrick that he couldn't always tell, but he didn't treat the two of them much differently, so he never minded not being sure.

Patrick could tell, most of the time. Jason's voice sounded a lot like Pete's at first, but the longer he talked, the clearer it would be that it wasn't Pete speaking. Jason flirted more and cracked fewer jokes. He was bored by novels and politics, but he loved autobiographies and true crime. They both lived for music, but Pete was the only one who wrote lyrics. Jason was a little better on bass. Patrick asked him if he could please make sure to show up on studio recording days, and Jason laughed. "It doesn't really work like that," he said. "But we'll see what we can do."

Jason's laugh was different, and he stood differently, his hip cocked out, and he had a sly look in his eyes a lot of the time. Not always.

Patrick worried that they would be offended if he couldn't recognize them. But gradually he found that the simplest thing was just to ask.  
   


"Pete wasn't lying to you," the new voice said. "It was me you saw the other day, not him."

"Who are you?" Patrick asked.

"Jason."

"I want to sit down," Patrick decided. But there were no chairs in the laundry room.

"Here," Pete – _Jason_ said, stepping aside from the dryer. He patted the top of it with his palm, and Patrick hoisted himself up and let his legs dangle weakly. "You okay?" Jason said, touching Patrick's knee.

Patrick looked at him, at the familiar jawline and scrubby hair. "Are you fucking with me?" he asked.

Jason bit his lip and shook his head.

"How'd you get your name?"

"Same way everybody does. My parents gave it to me."

Pete's mom had noticed the ballpoint tattoo, Jason explained, and Pete himself had been freaked out enough by its sudden appearance to agree to see a therapist. When Jason began talking directly to their mother, she had declared she and their father needed a name to call him by.

"And she's, I mean, your folks are okay with... you?" Patrick asked.

"Pretty much," Jason said.

"And your therapist..."

"He said he could help us work on integrating, if we wanted to. But we don't."

"Oh," Patrick said.

Jason tightened his hand, which Patrick now realized he'd never moved from Patrick's leg, and squeezed gently. "So are you still mad?"

"Uh," Patrick said. "No, I'm. No."

"Okay," Jason said. "Good. Then I'll just," and he let go, nodded, and left the room.

A day passed, and another, a week, a couple of states and a whole run of shows. Eventually Patrick realized Pete wasn't going to poke him or tickle him or tackle him to the ground and start laughing about how gullible he was. At least, not about this.  
   


Theoretically the gay thing should have been the easiest way to tell Pete and Jason apart. But in practice Pete kissed guys too, so it wasn't as obvious as Patrick might have thought. Sometimes it was more that other guys kissed Pete – he seemed startled when Gabe grabbed him, or when William did, and then Patrick was fairly certain it was Pete standing in their arms, even if it had been Jason they'd fucked. But Pete did his own grabbing every so often, declaring himself a makeout king, and it wasn't always easy to distinguish that from the early stages of Jason's hookups.

Walking in on actual sex again would probably make things pretty clear, but the image of that dark head bent down was plenty well enough fixed in Patrick's memory as it was. He really didn't need to see that again.  
   


Joe had known Pete longer, and he could be astonishingly calm about things, which made him a good person to talk to. "Joe," Patrick said accordingly, "can I ask you something?"

"Uh huh," Joe said.

"When Pete was younger. Was he ever – did he get –" _Abused,_ Patrick was thinking, _molested, beaten, raped,_ but he couldn't bring the words across his tongue. "Do you think someone did something to him, to fuck him up about being gay? To make him split?"

Joe considered this. "I think Pete's been fucked up for a long time," he said in his measured nasal drawl. "But come on, you know their folks aren't like that, at all. I don't know if it was even anything that _happened_, you know? Like, I think it's their inherent brain chemistry, or something."

Patrick nodded.

"And I don't think it's about being gay," Joe added. "I think that's just how Jason is."

"Huh," Patrick said.  
   


Julia was another surprise, though not as much of one as Jason originally was. She started talking to them at the beginning of Warped 2005 and hung around nearly all that summer. She hadn't turned up much since she'd ended things with Mikey, however. In fact, Andy once asked Patrick if he thought Julia might have been a fake, an act so that Jason could hook up with Mikey. But Patrick had seen Julia again the following winter, staring at her face in the mirror after a shower and rubbing her fingertips over her jaw.

"Hey, Patrick," she said without turning around. Her voice wasn't that much different than Pete's either, only a little higher in pitch, but her Illinois vowels were noticeably flatter.

"Hey, Jules," Patrick said, leaning against the frame of the open bathroom door. "What's up?"

She paused. "If it was just me in here," she told him, "I could do stuff. Change stuff." She stuck the fingers of both hands into her hair and pulled it back from her forehead. "But like we are… it wouldn't be fair to Jason and Pete."

"Yeah," Patrick said.

Julia finally turned away from the mirror and gave him a rueful shrug. Patrick smiled as comfortably as he could. She hitched the towel back up higher under her armpits and slipped past him out the door, and the next thing he heard was Pete's voice shouting for Dirty.  
   


It was possible, Patrick thought disloyally, that Julia was really the nicest of the bunch. Jason certainly never showed any of that kind of compunction about coming in with tattoo after tattoo that Pete never went to get finished. And Patrick might even have said something about Pete's complete and utter selfishness after the Best Buy night, if he'd been speaking to Pete at all at that point. But that was one of the things – the many things – that he let go when he and Pete made up again.

Sometimes afterwards when Patrick sang, "I'd kill to make them gold," he remembered that the line had been changed from "my core" to "my insides." He let that go too.  
   


Jason was completely used to passing as Pete in public, and for the most part he didn't seem to mind doing it. Pete cultivated a reputation for volatility that covered a lot of gaps, and Jason had learned to fake Pete's autograph really well. Jason's own handwriting, Patrick had noticed a few times, had rounder, tighter loops and more even lines than Pete's scrawl. But it was relatively rare that Jason wrote anything down, especially by hand.

Once, just after the beginning of the Nintendo Fusion tour, Jason had actually told an interviewer his name. Patrick was ready to shit a brick, and he could feel his mouth working to try to hide it. Joe looked just as worried, but Andy played it off as a joke, and Patrick relaxed a little. Jason didn't stop there, though; he talked on and on about coming out onstage – which he loved to do as often as possible, finding it hilarious that no one ever believed him – and about the guys he'd blown the night before. Patrick couldn't figure out what the hell was going on. Jason didn't seem pissed, or stressed out, or anything else that could have prompted this burst of frankness. It was just weird.

Joe turned away a bit, trying to escape, and Patrick tilted his hat as low over his face as it would go. But the interviewer was absolutely delighted, and even more so when Pete suddenly turned up and started flirting with her, towards the end of the shoot. Patrick wished he could give Pete a heads-up during the break, so Pete could maybe do some damage control before the cameras left. But the girl never left Pete's side all the way to the bus, so there was nothing Patrick could do. It was lucky, then, that Pete didn't actually seem upset when he saw the footage later.

"Whatever," he said, shrugging. "No one's going to care." And this, it turned out, was true.  
   


That incident aside, Jason didn't tell very many people who he was. Not even the guys he hooked up with, as best as Patrick could tell. He just let them think they'd been with Pete.

"And you're okay with that?" Patrick asked once.

Pete spread his hands out and looked at them with a moue of disinterest. "My mouth sucks dick, and my ass gets fucked," he said. "Is there a point in trying to convince those guys they didn't fuck Pete Wentz?"

"I guess not," Patrick said.

Pete looked up suddenly and smiled his broad, heart-stopping smile. "It's kind of funny, when you think about it," he said. Patrick couldn't help grinning back.

Later on, Pete did tell the Advocate that he wasn't attracted to dick. But it didn't seem like most people really believed that, any more than they believed Jason's assertions to the contrary.  
   


Pete, for his part, apparently didn't tell his girlfriends about Jason either. Patrick asked Ashlee how she was doing during one of her visits, and she wrinkled her nose and said, "Well, it's a no sex week, so I'm a little bummed. But basically fine."

"A no sex week?" Patrick repeated.

"Yeah," Ashlee said. "I don't know if you ever noticed, but Pete just… gets this way, sometimes. It's like, whatever."

"And you put up with that?" Patrick asked. He felt a little evil saying it, because what if she bucked up her self-esteem and dumped Pete? But he never got to ask Pete about this stuff, and he was desperately curious.

Ashlee nodded. "He's super sweet about it, he always sends me flowers and stuff, when he can't. And then when we do again…" She let her head fall back and her eyelids slide down. Patrick bit his lip.

"Yeah?" he risked saying.

"He's fucking unbelievable," Ashlee said. Then she opened her eyes and giggled. "Shit, don't tell him I said that. He'll be impossible to live with."

"Sure, no," Patrick said. He didn't feel the need to repeat it.  
   


Julia, on the other hand, told Mikey pretty much everything. Patrick guessed it couldn't really have worked if she hadn't. And she had chosen well; Mikey took it all in stride, and seemed genuinely to like Julia a lot. He spent nearly all his afternoons hanging out with her on the Fall Out Boy bus and always called her by name. Joe even took some pictures of the two of them. The shots turned out really cute, but Julia didn't want to keep them. Though she and Mikey weren't doing anything more than holding hands in them, she just didn't look like Pete – she wore his same jeans, but she liked tank tops and headbands, less eyeliner and more eye shadow and blush, and it made a surprisingly big difference – and she said Pete had had enough trouble already with his own photos getting out.

(Patrick had first assumed that the dick shots were Jason's, but Pete had hung his head and admitted that that was all him. Patrick had had to agree that that was totally typical.)

Mikey didn't mind being presumed gay, as such, but it did bother him a little just letting people think something that wasn't true. He tried to explain about himself and Pete once on his MySpace, but that only ended up causing more rumors, and Julia eventually convinced him to let it go. Patrick was pretty sure Mikey had still told his brother the truth, if not the rest of his band. But although Pete got lots of shit about Mikey, no one ever bothered him about Julia. So Patrick figured the Ways could live.  
   


Something Pete once said about having stuck to his guns with Jeanae made Patrick wonder if it could have been Julia with her, that last time. But Patrick was never going to ask any of them about that.  
   


Hemingway could be a little standoffish with Jason. Not terribly so – he let Jason take him for walks, and he would take treats from Jason's hand – but he didn't snuggle up the way he did with Pete. Pete was bizarrely gleeful when Patrick told him that.

"Who's my boy?" Pete crowed, grabbing Hemingway up in his arms. "Who's my bright, smart, wonderful boy? Who's my best boy who loves me?" Pete kissed Hemingway's jowls, and Hemingway licked Pete's face with matching enthusiasm. They looked so ridiculous that Patrick had to laugh at them out loud.  
   


Patrick wasn't terribly surprised to find himself the target of one of Gabe's grabs, during a comparatively mellow party. What threw him for a loop was how much Gabe's tongue turned him on. He tipped his head back and opened his mouth, and Gabe's lips were thrilling, Gabe's hands stroking down his sides felt absolutely sensational. Patrick forgot everything except chasing that feeling.

"Holy shit, Stump," Gabe said when he drew back. Patrick took one panting breath and then another. His dick, he realized, was pressed up tight against Gabe's thigh, and he wanted to disappear. But it was okay, because Gabe was grinning and saying, "Patrick, dude, you're coming in back with me right now."

"Okay," Patrick said.

He was sloppy, he could tell, sloppy and glaringly awkward. But Gabe's fingers stayed warm on his scalp and then his thighs, never letting him feel nervous, and Gabe's delighted smile never let him feel embarrassed. He didn't know why he'd never done this before.  
   


"You know," Pete said, settling next to Patrick in the front lounge, "you could have just told us you're gay, already. You know we wouldn't treat you any differently or anything, if you would just _tell_ us."

"Shut up," Patrick said. He could feel his face heating up. "I didn't know, okay?"

"Really? You didn't know?" Pete said curiously.

Patrick shrugged. "It just never occurred to me that – I mean, me, you know? Me?" He gestured at his own unremarkability. "And for a long time there was Anna, and… if I ever thought about it, I guess I never expected that it'd be so. Uh. Good."

"Oh, it was good?" Pete said, but this time it wasn't a question, and Patrick was forced to smack at Pete's ear and neck and shoulder, whatever he could reach, several times as hard as he could.  
   


"Hey, nice going," Jason said, rubbing his hand across Patrick's back. "So what'd you think of Gabe?"

"Um," Patrick said, and dropped his pick. He leaned forward to look for it. "Uh, you know."

Jason laughed. "Yup," he said. "Oh, but dude, you know who's really good, is –"

"Please don't tell me," Patrick said. Jason laughed some more.   
   


Patrick worried that he would go on to develop some horrible inappropriate crush on Gabe. But a few weeks later it occurred to him that he had no idea where Cobra Starship was touring, and that he'd deleted all Gabe's texts about studio times, and he was relieved to conclude that he was safe.

He found himself shying away from any more of Jason's priors, and that limited his options a little. However, he eventually managed to hook up again, and flattered himself he was leaving the awkwardness behind. Travis, at least, didn't make any complaints.   
   


Pete was as good as his word; he didn't treat Patrick any differently at all.  
   


Jason, for some reason, was not interested in Ryan. It was Pete who loved Ryan, with a fierce possessiveness that took Patrick by surprise. Pete spent hours texting Ryan about album concepts and inviting him for sleepovers and making him pancakes, of all things.

"But if you're playing Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board with him, I don't wanna hear about it," Patrick told Pete. Pete roared with laughter and stuck two fingers out, pressed together, and waved them in Patrick's face till Patrick wrestled his arm down to the table.

Jason did like Brendon, and Pete laughed whenever he saw the pictures afterwards. "Good times, huh?" he said, gesturing at the photos of casino tables or Brendon's skinny, bare back at the bowling alley. Then Patrick would laugh too.

Jason thoroughly enjoyed posting pictures of himself, even more so lately than Pete, who'd gotten somewhat less excited about it after the leak. Neither Jason nor Julia shared Pete's sheer love of words, but with the way Pete left his passwords scribbled everywhere, it was no surprise that they both occasionally yielded to the temptation to sign in.

"Wouldn't you rather have your own journal?" Patrick asked. Jason shrugged.

"Not much point," he said. "The second I put a picture up, people will recognize our face."

"Oh," Patrick said, "yeah, huh."  
   


"But c'mon, Pete," he tried again. "If you'd just make yourself memorize one stupid password, you could have one journal that you keep private."

"One private journal for sharing all my thoughts with the fans and the rest of the Internet?" Pete said.

Patrick pressed his lips together.

"No, look," Pete said more mildly, "I just really don't care, okay?"

"Okay, fine," Patrick said.

He didn't press Pete on the subject again, but he couldn't stop himself from guessing at who'd written each entry that went up. Julia barely ever posted anything after Mikey's departure, but Patrick saw one entry that said, _do you ever get the feeling that your insides and your outsides dont really go together?_, and he figured that was her, although he hadn't seen her in person for some time.

Another entry said simply, _I am ready to be me again._ Patrick stared at that one for quite a while before deciding it was probably Pete.  
   


Patrick went over to Pete's house right before the Honda Civic Tour and watched while Pete threw a veritable ton of lube packets into his bag, and a narrow red headband.

"Do you think Julia's gonna come out for the tour?" Patrick asked.

"I dunno," Pete said, closing the bag up. "But it doesn't hurt to be prepared." His fingers lingered there, fiddling with the zipper.

"That's nice of you," Patrick said vaguely.

Pete quirked up one corner of his mouth. "I guess?" he said. Patrick made himself look away.  
   


On the stop in Chicago, Patrick went along with Jason to his parents' house in Wilmette. His mom opened the door, threw her arms wide, and said, "Pete, honey."

Patrick opened his mouth to correct her, but then he looked and saw it was indeed Pete squeezing her tight while she petted the long hair at the back of his neck. Patrick closed his mouth up again.

"Patrick, come in, dear," she said over Pete's shoulder. "It's nice to see you, too."

"Thanks, Mrs. Wentz," he said.  
   


During the second half of the tour Patrick started to wonder if Jason was flirting with him. With intent, that was. Jason always flirted incorrigibly, of course, offering to marry everyone from Andy to Dirty, and he and Pete were both incredibly handsy with Patrick, year in and year out. But these touches were different. The hugs had more thrust to them, the kisses more tongue, and the trails of Jason's fingertips on Patrick's arms seemed to leave more heat in their wake. It was a little confusing.  
   


"So, uh," Patrick brought himself to ask, "are there, you know, any more of you in there?"

"Not right now," Jason said, and his smile turned teasing. "You saying we aren't enough for you?"

"No. No," Patrick said. "Believe me, you're plenty."

Jason grinned and nuzzled his nose into Patrick's neck. "You say the sweetest things," he said against Patrick's skin.  
   


Then for a couple of weeks Jason disappeared, and Patrick spent every night sitting across from Pete, trading song drafts back and forth. Pete kicked Patrick's toes, and Patrick knocked his knee against Pete's shin, and everything was warm and perfect.  
   


The next thing Patrick knew, he was waking up on his bus with Jason straddling his hips. "Hi, Jason," he said once he'd figured it out.

"Isn't it a glorious morning?" Jason said, and while Patrick was looking at him, nonplussed, he leaned down and pressed a hard kiss to Patrick's mouth. "Keep that for me till later, 'kay?"

"What?" Patrick said, and Jason grinned.

"Take your shower, we're almost there." And that was all that he would say.

During sound check, while Joe was working with the techs on the nuances of his guitar, Patrick found himself touching a hand to his own mouth, trying to cover up the almost-bruised feeling. Jason caught his eye from across the stage and winked.

"C'mon," Jason said much later, after the show and the afterparty and loadout. Patrick let Jason take him by the hand and lead him out of the venue, onto Pete and Joe's bus, and all the way back to Pete's bedroom. Jason pulled the door shut behind them and leaned against it. "Now gimme my kiss back," he said.

Patrick stared at the laughing mouth in front of him, and suddenly his whole head was swimming with reckless abandon. "Okay," he said. He stepped forward, crowding Jason back against the door, and gave back as good as he'd gotten in the morning.

Everything felt rushed, frantic, though there was no real reason it had to be. Patrick dropped backward onto the bed, taking Jason with him, and that was the last bit of control that he got for a while. Strong hands moved over him to strip him, an insistent tongue pushed his lips apart, a wet mouth stretched around his cock, and Patrick hadn't done much more than moan at it all.

Then there was only one hand left wrapped over his cock, palming him gently, while Jason moved up to whisper "fuck me" in Patrick's ear.

Patrick was so hard, and he'd waited for so long. "Yes," he groaned, "yeah," and Jason pressed a packet of lube into his palm. Patrick got a pang at that, but he quelled it and flipped Jason over. And being above and inside him was amazing, so much heat around Patrick's cock, so much warm skin under his hands. Patrick had to work a bit to get a rhythm going, but then he did, and it was incredible, like a song, like something he'd need Pete to give him words for, and he felt another pang because it would be empty till then, all hollow, but it was too late, too late, he was coming, and in his hand Jason was coming, and it was all over.

Patrick pulled out and tied the condom off in silence.

"Night, Patrick," was the last soft comment.

"Night –" Patrick pressed his mouth shut on the name that sprang to his lips, and dropped an apologetic kiss onto Jason's shoulder blade instead. Then he turned over resolutely and willed himself to sleep.  
   


Patrick woke up almost just like he had the day before, with Pete's sturdy body braced over him. This time he knew right away that it was Pete, though, and there was equally no doubt that Pete was furious.

"Tell me you didn't fuck him," Pete hissed as soon as he saw Patrick's eyes open. Patrick squeezed his eyelids shut again. "Patrick," Pete said, very low.

"I'm sorry, Pete," Patrick said.

Pete vaulted off Patrick's body and came to rest on his knees on the other side of the bed. "Fuck you!" Pete yelled. "Fuck you, and fuck him. What'd you go and do that for? _I'm_ your best friend, Patrick! Me!"

Patrick blinked. "Yeah, you are," he said. "It was a mistake, Pete. I'm sorry."

"Well then, what the fuck?" Pete was still yelling, but at least he was looking in Patrick's direction again. "I mean, what the hell were you thinking?"

"Pete –" Patrick sat up and scrubbed his hands over his face. He wanted to find his hat and glasses, but Pete didn't seem likely to brook any interruptions. And maybe Patrick could see clearly enough without them. "I think," he said, "the truth is, it's a mistake I made a long time ago."

"The fuck is that supposed to mean?"

Patrick took a deep breath. "Look, I know it's stupid. But when I first met Jason, you know? and I found out he was gay, I think – without really knowing it, subconsciously or whatever, on some level I thought it meant there was a way for me to have you."

"You can have me," Pete said instantly. "I'll fuck you, I'll let you fuck me, I'll fucking marry you. Just don't leave me."

He grabbed both of Patrick's hands, and Patrick held on for dear life. Two distinct thoughts filled Patrick's head: Pete was seriously, truly fucked up; and he, Patrick, loved Pete like crazy.

He kept the first thought to himself.

"I love you, Pete," he said, slowly and clearly. "You don't have to fuck me. I'm not going anywhere."

"I meant it," Pete said.

"I know," Patrick said. "But let's not."

"Okay," Pete said more quietly. His grip didn't loosen, but his face eased a little.

"C'mere," Patrick said. He lay back on the pillows and tugged Pete down on top of him, naked as they were. It was a little weird, but that was really the least of his worries right then.

Pete lay still for a surprisingly long time while Patrick ran his palm up and down Pete's spine, over and over. Finally Pete heaved a deep breath and relaxed.

"Better?" Patrick said.

"Yeah," Pete said.

Just then Hemingway nosed the door open and came snuffling up to the side of the bed. Pete rolled away to haul him up onto the mattress with them, and they rearranged themselves to lie facing each other on their sides, both curled around Hemingway's bulk. Pete petted the top of Hemingway's head.

"I'm sorry, Patrick," he said a few minutes later. "You don't owe me – you should be with who you want."

Patrick swallowed hard. "I will be," he said. "And so will you. But still, you and me, okay?"

Pete nodded. "Me and you."

Patrick leaned over Hemingway to kiss Pete once, soft and warm, on the lips.

Then he drew back and said, "So, breakfast?" Hemingway, who knew that word well, snorted his approval loudly. And when Patrick looked up, Pete was smiling.


End file.
